Per appointment hearing for new chair of EHRC. This afternoon

[impossibletoday]

If anyone wants to listen/watch

https://x.com/CommonsWEC/status/1939616377750401117?t=MLdkge4QWLoyBv6F2SOSA&s=19

The thing about 'compassion' is that it is not something that is particularly relevent to the public realm when it comes to facilities. We come across multitudes of people everyday when out in public. We don't go around being all misty eyed and "compassionate towards humanity". We have single sex spaces for good reason...and that reason is to do with having compassion for the 'situation' of women and girls generally.

Kennedy is obviously fixated on a ( male) personal friend, acquaintance or family member who has 'transitioned' and in being so has lost all perspective that other people, namely women, also have a right and a need for empathy and sensitivity. We are expected, en masse, to see her friend as she does, and in doing so dismiss our own needs for privacy and dignity.

@Shortshriftandlethal yep. Very different when you are up for the same job and a trans person turns up and literally plonks ‘if you don’t give me the job’ I will sue you. That was 2011/12 9n a school setting.

Kennedy is obviously fixated on a ( male) personal friend, acquaintance or family member who has 'transitioned' and in being so has lost all perspective that other people, namely women, also have a right and a need for empathy and sensitivity.

This would fit with an ‘aged trans woman’ question and explain the skewed perspective. As others say, surprising for someone trained to evaluate evidence.

If this were a TV drama, she'd say "I used to be a man" and everyone else would gasp in astonishment because she passes perfectly, and then they'd all crowd around to give her hugs and high fives 😂

So Kennedy's weirdly specific example, and her very emotional state, leads me to believe that she's got a specific person in mind, either a close friend or family member. And that makes it impossible for her to do the lawyerly thing and step back and look at matters objectively.

There's a couple of things that are not discussed openly in current Labour politics. One is that, for whatever reasons (I suspect Lord Alli's influence on candidate selection) the PLP has a wildly disproportionate number of gay MPs, particularly in the 2024 intake, most of whom will be embedded in alphabet community politics. I think we saw that with Peter Swallow's contributions in particular.

I've no problem with gay MPs obviously, and not even a problem with them being somewhat overrepresented. But if they're 15-20% of the PLP and they're heavily Stonewalled, that can be a problem.

The other thing that's not discussed openly, though it's a fixture in Labour gossip, is how many senior MPs have trans-identified children. One doesn't want to get into specifics, because there's a lack of reliable information and anyway MPs' families have a right to privacy, but in Starmer's cabinet it could be anything from three to six ministers, depending on who you believe.

Put those two things together, add in some handmaidens, and it's a bit like having 50 Jolyon Maughams in parliament.

Weirdly enough, I can imagine Stephen Kinnock emerging as a pragmatist on this. Just a hunch, and I may well be wrong, but I don't think fanaticism is in his nature, and he could try to hold onto a "true trans" position while thinking the extremism of the trans lobby has been counterproductive.

Wasn’t Helena Kennedy involved with Scottish government with the misogyny bill and she included trans women as being women in her bill

This here where she said transwomen first as describing women who need protection

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/feb/22/ill-set-no-limits-on-which-women-to-protect-from-hate-says-helena-kennedy

What about the an aged women who's used to using single sex spaces her entire life? Said transwomen probably spent over half his life using the men's toilet. But women with an internationally recognized right to the dignity of single-sex provisions doesn't even warrant mention. It's so offensive. And unfortunately it's still impolite to point out exactly what the ask is.

This is much too late to be awake but for the first time I am cool but have got really heated listening to this pathetic exhibition of bias.

So these are my random comments:

Early part was orchestrated to imply existing EHRC is a failure.

Allegation that Supreme Court said EHRC Interim Guidelines have gone too far is false.

MAS seems quite good at not every really saying anything definitive, but this has meant she did not attempt to curry favour with TRA sponsored questions. (They are so pathetically over exaggerated as usual. We've had so many letters. Repeatign SM nonsense.)

Another badly run Committee that has been hijacked by single issue fanatics.

Baroness Kennedy seems deranged.

Now Sarah Owen has implied Baroness Falkner had said trans women have no rights! WTF??????????????

I feel another complaint coming on. I think we need to let Parliament know we have no faith in the WEC and specifcally Sarah Owen to be Chair

MAS has continued to not give in to TW are the most discriminated against.

This has been a shockingly badly run pre appointment meeting, and in fact makes me doubt the value of the Human Rights Committee who seem to think they should join in the Trans must come first. There are many Human Rights issue currently in the UK that they should have had questions about.

Honestly, they make student debates look mature.

But these committee members making it blatantly clear they will work to undermine any attempts to put the Supreme Court ruling into action.

But was heartened that MAS has continued to speak up for single sex spaces.

(MAS = Mary Ann Stephenson)

Labour’s pick to chair equalities watchdog backs gender-critical feminists
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/01/labours-equalities-chair-backs-gender-critical-feminists/
and in full at https://archive.is/nySt5

Keir Starmer’s EHRC pick defends freedom of expression on gender
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/keir-starmers-ehrc-pick-defends-freedom-of-expression-on-gender-62lvb7c8n
and at https://archive.is/7pcBL

Perhaps a very basic question-why do trans women seem to get more airtime than trans men?

Because they are men and men always are the priority.

There was a time when there was some attempt at waffle from well trained women with trans identities explaining that men with trans identities were so much more oppressed....

but no. It's just because they're men.

If that was true it would be because being seen as a woman, rather than being seen as a man, is a far greater demotion in status.

Because all the news stories are about situations where a TWAW approach has caused a problem/court case, so TW talking heads get wheeled out to do some opinionating?

There's some interesting threads on Reddit from people fishing for info to try to discredit Dr Mary Ann Stephenson e.g.

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1l4c52b/request_for_help_please_provide_specific_examples/

These are the examples they found of her egregious bigotry:

"attended filia 2021 conference"

"gave a positive review to "Sexed" by Susanna Rustin. Look at who the other reviewers are: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sexed-History-Feminism-Susanna-Rustin/dp/1509559116"

"Maya Forstater forwarded an article to her on 13 Jun 2019."

"donated £25 to Allison Bailey"

Had a discussion with Victoria Smith and Sarah Ditum in 2015 - both those women went on to be consistently and loudly gender-critical on Twitter in later years…”

I mean, seriously, with all the digging, this is the ‘worst’ they can say about her.
She addressed the issues really well during the questioning, but FFS!

(Imagine the other way round, how difficult would it be to find evidence of support for TRA organisations from lots of these politicians and officials)

Anyway, she supported women's rights, the witch, so clearly an evil bigot.

Really fucks me off that her support for women's rights is the only "bias" that's being investigated - people aren't complaining about her support for any other vulnerable groups - just TRAs doing their misogynistic thing)

This demonstrates so clearly the unhinged incel like obsession with women that these people have. It does seem that some of them could a real danger to women's safety - especially women in the public eye who speak out about this.

Yes, watching the session yesterday I found myself worrying for her safety - she's a brave woman.

There were several of the MPs who had clearly been given this dossier, and... there's nothing to it, except that she's spent her career in the women's sector and knows lots of people there and understands their concerns.

That in itself is supposed to be damning.

If the government had proposed Ruth Hunt, I don't think anyone except Rosie would have been asking questions about perceived bias.

It's actually a good question to ask from time to time. There are several reasons I can think of:

• In general because of the overwhelming nature of sexual violence being perpetrated by men toward women, it's broadly understood that women need specially protection in the form of single-sex spaces and services. We know that predatory men will go to great lengths to get access to women's spaces, and because there is no effective way to distinguish between true transwomen and predititory men identifying as women, to allow transwomen into women's spaces would eliminate those spaces' effectiveness. The number of predatory women who seek to get access to men's spaces is practically nil, so the problem of fake transmen doesn't occur and from a perspective of modesty, many men (probably most) are indifferent to the presence of transmen in their spaces.
• Transwomen as an activist group are far more aggressive than transmen and their aggression, including threats of violence and rape are disproportionately directed toward women, especially GC women
• A significant portion of transwomen are heterosexual men with sexual fetishes for seeing themselves in women's clothing and imagining themselves physically as women. These men sometimes have an extreme need to seen by/validated by other women while presenting as female. This has lead to many rather uncomfortable, nasty and threatening encounters when they're not validated. And because of the fact that on average transwomen are stronger and larger, these encounters have a fairly high emotional impact for those who have experienced them directly (of course) but also for those who have witnessed them IRL or on social media.
• Transmen are usually far less physical imposing, and in general the need for validation are less likely to turn into confrontations in the way that happen between transwomen and women. In addition, though there are not reliable statistics, a very prominent reason for women to transition is to escape from the perceived vulnerability or disadvantage of being a female in our society. Most women have a degree of sympathy for this, especially when informed that a disproportionate number of women who transition have autism and/or suffer from a history of physical and sexual abuse.
• Transwomen are much less likely to pass than transmen. Practically no transwomen are undetectable as being trans, especially by women. Transmen are more likely to to be undetectable, and much more likely to not standout in a crowd or in brief encounters. Whether this is fair or not, transwomen who don't remotely pass as women, make it very difficult to make the case that they are in fact women and weaken the argument for GI generally.

@GallantKumquat thanks for the reply. I guess I had the same thoughts but was not able to articulate it as clearly as you.

Reading all this reminds me of the famous spoof speech which goes:

“Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, he has a brother who is a known homo sapiens, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.”

I'm sure Reddit will soon accuse MAS of all these crimes against nature😂

Well, she's already faced a panel of MPs trying to find out if she weighs the same as a duck...